Penny Cyclopaedia
The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was a multi-volume encyclopedia edited by George Long and published by Charles Knight alongside the Penny Magazine. Twenty-seven volumes and three supplements were published from 1828 to 1843.
Contributors
The contributors to the Penny Cyclopædia were not individually credited with the articles they created, although a list of their names appears in volume 27.[1][2] The contributors included many notable figures of the period, including the librarian Henry Ellis, the biblical scholar John Kitto, the publisher Charles Knight, the critic George Henry Lewes, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, the surgeon James Paget, the statistician George Richardson Porter, the sanitary reformer Thomas Southwood Smith, and the art historian Ralph Nicholson Wornum.[3]
Influence
The novelist Herman Melville is known to have used the Penny Cyclopædia while writing Moby-Dick and other novels, and scholar Paul McCarthy has suggested that the encyclopedia's coverage of moral insanity and monomania may have influenced Melville's characters in Moby-Dick and other writings.[4]
References
External links
- Penny Cyclopaedia digitised on Google Book Search
- Hathi Trust. fulltext
